Funeral Home Learns Veteran Has No Family. That’s When Six Teenagers Grab the Casket

On December 12, Navy veteran Jerry Wayne Pino, age 70, died in Long Beach, Mississippi. Not much is known about Pino other than his military history.

He was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana and joined the Navy in New Orleans and he was a petty officer third class in Vietnam. Other than that, his biography is empty.

No family members or friends claimed his body while it lay at Riemann Family Funeral Homes for several weeks. “No one stepped forward; he just didn’t have any family,” said Cathy Warden, a worker at the funeral home.

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Discussing what they would do about the situation, Warden spoke with her colleague, Eva Boomer, and they decided something needed to be done to give the veteran an appropriate send off. “Something had to be done with respect,” Warden said. “We had to give him what he deserved. Nobody should go alone.”

Boomer is a military veteran herself, and she thought a few boys at the Long Beach High School would consider serving as pallbearers. So Warden called her teenage son, Bryce, and asked him to contact a few of his friends.

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Within a matter of minutes, there were six, young men volunteering to carry a stranger’s casket and stand in respect as he was buried. They all knew it was what they needed to do.

“It was the right thing to do,” Bailey Griffin, 17, said. “He served our country. He fought for our rights. For him to be buried with nobody there was just sad. I told myself I was going to do it and I did it.”

On the Tuesday he was to be buried, Griffin, Joseph Ebberman, JT Tripp, Jake Strong, Kenny McNutt, and James Kneiss all arrived for the memorial service in their khaki pants, collared shirts and ties, to pay respects for a man they had never even met. Taking their places next to the flag-draped coffin, they picked it up and escorted him to his resting place.

“I went out there for the service and cried the whole way through,” Warden said. “He had no one there. This veteran had nobody standing there but these boys.”

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However, the most moving part of the ceremony was not when the boys lined up and carried the casket. When the two Navy honor guards folded the flag, they presented it to the six young men.

“It touched my heart,” Warden said. “Our community is teaching these boys from the heart how it should be—how to care.”

The young men are still trying to decide what to do with Pino’s funeral flag. It has been encased in glass and includes a plaque bearing his name, but they are unsure of where it should go.

Since all six of them attend the same high school, they may find somewhere to display it in the building. They have considered placing it in the locker room, because four of them play football.

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Either way, it is a fitting tribute for the man who died alone to be continually surrounded by so many people — people for whom he fought to protect so many years ago. But perhaps the encased flag with Pino’s name may serve more as a reminder of the six boys who gave up their time to pay their respects to a stranger, because “nobody should go alone.”

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